New Listing: LPT token

We’re excited to announce that Livepeer is listing its native token, LPT, on Liquid. 

What is Livepeer? 

Livepeer is the world’s first decentralized video streaming architecture. 

An innovative open-source protocol overlaid on the Ethereum blockchain. It offers video app developers the power and means to bring their ideas to life without the crippling fees charged by traditional centralized services. 

LPT is used for governance, as a reward for network participation, and as a means of staking by node operators and the token holders who back their work.

How does Livepeer work?

Streaming video was flourishing even before COVID-19 lockdowns forced hundreds of millions of us to turn to the virtual world for entertainment, education, and interaction. Now, video accounts for fully 80% of Internet traffic and probably more.

But broadcasters hoping to capture a piece of the $70 billion live streaming market face an enormous hurdle: the vast sums centralized infrastructure providers charge for services essential to creating stable and high-quality feeds.

One of the most important of these services is adaptive bitrate transcoding—the reformatting of raw video to ensure an optimal viewing experience regardless of device or network speed. 

Livepeer’s decentralized infrastructure dramatically reduces this cost burden. Because the network is blockchain-based and powered by a nexus of node operators—known as orchestrators—developers can access transcoding and other services for up to 50X less than they would pay to established players. 

The network has enabled the low-cost development of various apps, from a protocol that helps retailers set up live eCommerce channels that allow them to hold events and interact with customers in real-time to a virtual venue provider for DJs. 

The clearest indication of Livepeer’s growing utility to developers is the surge in its most closely watched metric: the minutes of raw video transcoded each week on its network. Last summer, that number was trending around 10,000–20,000 minutes. By June 5^th, it had ballooned to 1 million minutes. Within days of achieving that milestone, it had doubled to more than 2 million minutes. 

What role does LPT play in the Livepeer ecosystem? 

Livepeer’s native token plays a critical part in this success.  

It is, first and foremost, the primary incentive for the orchestrators whose computational power and bandwidth enable services on the network. However, LPT also rewards another category of users: those who deposit—or stake—tokens supporting successful node operators. This group is known as delegators.

Finally, those who stake LPT gain a voice in Livepeer’s decentralized governance.

Work is allocated to orchestrators based on the volume of LPT they have staked on the network—either their own or those committed to them by delegators—as well as factors such as location and track record. In the Livepeer ecosystem, work=rewards, so orchestrators vie to attract as many delegators as possible.

At the end of each round, the Livepeer protocol mints new LPT, according to an inflation rate determined by the amount of activity on the network. These rewards are allocated to each participant in proportion to how much they have contributed to the work, either by running a node or staking tokens to an orchestrator.

Orchestrators also earn a share of their delegators’ rewards as a commission for running the decentralized infrastructure.

The model is all designed to encourage the high levels of network participation that fuel Livepeer’s success. The more tokens that are committed to the functioning of the network, the more robust and secure it becomes. That, in turn, helps attract more broadcasters—and thus more user fees. It’s a virtuous circle that starts with LPT. 

And network participation is growing. Livepeer orchestrators already offer enough computing power and capacity to encode real-time video that flows through Twitch, Facebook and YouTube combined. 

What comes next?

Livepeer’s research team has been delving into the possibility of adding a whole roster of video processing tasks that would be valuable to broadcasters: everything from object recognition through to song title detection. 

And in further investment in the future, the project sponsored ETHGlobal’s Web3 Weekend hackathon in May: three days of high-intensity development that yielded some superb ideas for decentralized live-streaming apps and accompanying hacks to showcase what is possible for video + web3.

These steps along the road to Livepeer’s ultimate goal are to serve as the primary infrastructure for a new, open, decentralized video streaming industry.

Where can you buy LPT?

LPT is now available to trade on Liquid. Currently, the available trading pair is LPT/BTC.